


tasting immortality

by Wildcard



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-07-04
Packaged: 2018-04-07 15:08:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4267893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wildcard/pseuds/Wildcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soraka still remembers the taste of immortality on her tongue. Mortals try to tempt her to eat but she will not surrender her last tie to her home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tasting immortality

Soraka remembers the taste of immortality on her tongue. She didn’t have a tongue back then. She had only a sense of wonder, of excitement and laughter that danced across her senses in a scatter of phosphorus and sulfur. She holds onto those memories now, scribbles down words that try to describe the flow of liquid helium and the slow bloom of liquid methane.

They bring her food, these others. Mortal foods meant for sustaining mortals and she knows it is a kindness, is too gracious to turn them away, but each dish reminds her anew of how she has diminished. Her body is no longer burning. Her body is dying.

* * *

“I thought you might like this,” Leona says and sets her offering down. The round, golden pastries have a flaky crust and smell sweet. “It’s a sun cake. We make them on special days as an offering to the Sun. And the sun shares the sky with the stars, after all!”

Soraka smiles, less because of the gift and more because of Leona’s warm heart and lack of wisdom.

“The sun is a star,” she says, her voice quiet as a resting giant’s. “All stars are suns, if you get close enough.”

“…So the sun has someone like you?” Leona asks and it is to her credit that she does not flee what must sound like rank heresy. Perhaps there is hope for her and Diana yet, Soraka thinks, and chides herself that even now, she cannot give up her interest in mortal love affairs.

“The sun is someone like me,” Soraka corrects and reaches out to tap Leona lightly on the breastbone. “That is your body, bone and flesh and blood. It is not what you are. What you see, the bright light, that’s the sun’s body. What the sun is – is someone like me.”

But untarnished, unfallen, still able to sweep across the sky and through the wide swirl of galaxies.

Leona nods slowly and in her eyes is the awe of a true believer confronted by a god.

* * *

“I heard Leona came and brought you food,” a voice says from the shadows. Diana steps into sight a moment later, bearing a small, cloth-wrapped triangle.

“Yes,” Soraka says because it is true. She does not rise from where she is seated cross-legged at the foot of the tree, leaning against the trunk to keep herself upright.

Diana approaches with the quick, unsure steps of a wild animal, hurt and longing to flee, but drawn to Soraka anyway. She kneels on the grass and starts to ubknot the cloth around the parcel, revealing little white cakes, round as the sun cakes were.

“They’re moon cakes. The Lunari used to make them to celebrate the Lunar festival – there’s an egg yolk inside to resemble the full moon,” Diana explains and asks in the same breath, "Is it true you told Leona the sun has a spirit like you?”

“No,” Soraka says, correcting again this tendency of mortals to conflate the body and the soul, “I told her the sun is a spirit like me. That all stars are suns. All stars burn just as the sun does.”

There’s no hostility in Diana’s eyes at the thought she is facing a sun-spirit, only an odd trepidation. Does she think Soraka will strike her down? No. Everyone knows the Starchild is a healer.

“…Does the moon have a spirit too? Have you met her?” Diana asks finally and in her pale eyes, there is a plea that strikes to Soraka’s very heart. Ah. She must consider her words carefully for it is faith alone that drives the Lunari to live her fugitive life and continue her quest for justice.

“Yes,” Soraka says and puts all her conviction into the word. “All things do.”

Her fingertips touch not the cake but rather, the grass on which she is seated. “Every blade of grass has a spirit. I have not met the spirit of the moon but I know there is one.”

Thinking of her time in the sky as a celestial and how they loved to watch their tiny carbon cousins tottering about on their specks of rock, she says more gently, “And I am sure she watches you with approval.”

There is a wetness to Diana’s eyes that Soraka does not quite understand. She thinks it is the human response known as tears.

* * *

“You have to eat something,” Kayle insists, plonking down a tray of various dishes before Soraka. “Here’s some of my favorite Demacian dishes.”

“No,” Soraka says with a shake of her head, “No, but thank you for the spirit in which it was offered.”

She has read the mortal tales of how Persephone was trapped by six pomegranate seeds. Even if she could get over the revulsion at the thought of putting strange matter into her orifice and masticating it with her protruding bones and then swallowing, she does not want to risk being trapped. Not when the stars will surely take her back if she just keeps herself pure and doesn’t allow mortality to taint her anymore than it already has.

“Eat,” Kayle insists with that older sister bossiness that Soraka remembers from her own days of being scolded by blue hypergiants. “It’s not good to starve.”

“No,” Soraka says again. “I am not starving.”

* * *

“I nearly died of starvation when I first arrived here,” Morgana tells Soraka as she unboxes at least twelve little cups of desserts. “Everyone was eating everyone else. Meat. Milk. Eggs. I could not find anything to eat that did not make me feel like the monster I had been labeled.”

She offered one of the diminutive cups to Soraka with a spoon no bigger than Soraka’s smallest finger.

“So I started up Sinful Succulence. Everything is made only from plant matter and I did my best to replicate the tastes of my home world. It is by no means perfect but it is better than what they eat here. Perhaps it will be more palatable for you as well.”

Soraka’s heart aches a little to reject the food but Morgana’s reasoning is flawed. Soraka reaches out and touches one of Morgana’s clawed fingers, fingertips skating over the metal-smooth bone.

“We are not as alike as you think, Morgana. You are an immortal but that is your body,” Soraka tells Morgana, her voice soft and sorrowing. “You are carbon. You are kin to the mortals that live here. My body…”

The stars are not visible but the sun is so Soraka points at it, fingers outstretched as if she could draw it down from the sky.

“That is what I am. Burning my own mass, not taking in the death of others to survive.” She cannot eat meat, she cannot eat plants. Her body must consume itself and give off light.

“That is what your body was,” Morgana corrects and pushes the glass of triple-layered mousse towards Soraka again. She taps Soraka’s hand, just as Soraka had done to her. “This is what your body is now and it needs to eat.”

“No,” Soraka says, drawing her hand back and resting it on her lap. “No. I will not live off the deaths of others.”

* * *

Bard comes and brings Soraka a sparkling, effervescent golden light. It hovers over his fluffy hand in the shape of an orb and then floats over to bump against Soraka’s lips.

She opens her mouth and it flows over her tongue, down her throat, light spreading through her and suffusing her skin until she glows. She sheds light, the way she used to, and if she closes her eyes, she can almost believe she is home again.

For the first time since her exile started, Soraka laughs.


End file.
